Some of the highest rates of impunity in the murders of journalists can be attributed to killings by Islamist militant groups, CPJ found in its latest Global Impunity Index, which spotlights countries where journalists are murdered and their killers go free. The worst country for the second year in a row is Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabaab is suspected in the majority of media murders, followed by Iraq and Syria, where members of the militant group Islamic State murdered at least six journalists in the past year.

New York, September 29, 2016-- The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the kidnapping of Abid Abdullah, executive director of the Jang media group, and called on Pakistani authorities to ensure the safety of journalists who the kidnappers explicitly threatened.

"Everyone will get their turn in this war, especially the slave Pakistani media," warned Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban on Twitter this week. "We are just waiting for the appropriate time."

New York, July 27, 2015--Unidentified armed men in Pakistan abducted the Karachi bureau chief of the TV channel Geo News on Saturday and beat and robbed him before releasing him, according to news reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Faheem Siddiqui's abduction and calls on Pakistani authorities to ensure the assailants are held to justice.

The Pakistani journalist knew the risk, but he wrote the story about the militants anyway. Years earlier he had been shot, after reporting on another taboo subject, but for him the freelance work was thrilling, even after he had to marry his girlfriend in secret and flee Pakistan without her--and still now, since the nightmares began.

Hamid Mir and I last saw each other in Islamabad in late January at a meeting of the Pakistan Coalition on Media Safety. Mir, a senior anchor for Geo News, seemed as if he was on the road to recovery, but he was obviously still in pain from injuries he sustained during an assassination attempt on him last year. On April 19, 2014, Mir was shot multiple times as he left Karachi's main airport.

One year ago Raza Rumi, a TV anchor and widely-respected analyst in Pakistan, narrowly escaped death when gunmen opened fire on his car in an attack that killed his driver, Mustafa. When I wrote about the March 28 attack, the fourth on the Express Group in eight months that had left four people dead, I highlighted the lack of a police investigation.

Pakistan's media, long under siege, face new challenges. "We had managed to get the genie out of the lamp," was the way one Pakistani journalist explained it to me during a trip there last month. "But now, the military has pushed it back in and I'm not sure when we'll be able to get it out again."

Syria is the world’s deadliest country for journalists for the third year in a row. International journalists were killed at a higher rate in 2014 than in recent years. A CPJ special report by Shazdeh Omari

The well-known and controversial Pakistani television talk show host Hamid Mir survived a murder attempt on April 19, even though he was hit with six bullets--two of which are still in his body. "I can move, I can walk and I can talk, but I am still undergoing physiotherapy and taking medication," he emailed to a small group of associates, including CPJ, over the weekend.